


Interlopers

by nightberrypearl



Category: NU'EST
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Gen, Introspection, Loosely based on ideas from Good Omens, M/M, Shippy Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23805844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightberrypearl/pseuds/nightberrypearl
Summary: They had only ever been taught that there was option 1, or option 2. It's only now that they're finding their option 3.
Relationships: Hwang Minhyun & Kim Jonghyun | JR, Hwang Minhyun/Kim Jonghyun | JR
Comments: 8
Kudos: 32





	Interlopers

**Author's Note:**

> What's this? I've written something? :O 
> 
> Yes, I've dragged myself out of my hermit cave momentarily and this is the result. 
> 
> I think the first little bit of this was written all the way back in December? and I only just found the inspiration to finish the thing. Whatever this thing is, I'm not entirely sure. Hopefully something resembling sense can be made of it.

Minhyun stood at the precipice of some mountain he didn’t care to specify. They all looked about the same anyway in his opinion - a bit rocky and somewhat tall, earthy, with maybe a touch of snow if it was feeling special. It didn’t matter which it was anyway; it wasn’t the mountain that mattered, just that it had a steep cliff from which he could stare out over the landscape. 

He had noted that the humans did this. This quiet introspection while facing out over the world. Something about the distant earth below them apparently made them feel like their issues were somehow diminished. Minhyun had thought he’d give it a try. 

It wasn’t really working for him.

He was  _ bored _ . How did the humans even do this? Didn’t they get bored? Probably not, Minhyun mused, those humans found even the smallest things novel and interesting. After all, they’d seen so little of everything that even the most mundane things would seem groundbreaking. (He still remembered the whole hullabaloo they all made about fire of all things. Honestly, what else did they expect to happen when rocks were struck together?)

He wasn’t quite sure what else he needed to be doing because what he was doing didn’t seem to be giving him any sort of life changing epiphanies that had been advertised to him, nor any sort of reprieve from the thoughts inside his head. 

In hindsight, it was silly of him to think that looking out over a couple of unremarkable, grassy, essentially hilltops from a vaguely tall place would mean the same to him as it did those humans. He’d seen these very same sights, better sights even, from places higher up than this - from the highest up place even. When you’ve seen things from Above, anything less just wasn’t the same. 

It wasn’t like the landscape was anything to remark about either. Certainly nothing to write home about - not that anyone at ‘home’ would care, and not that Minhyun really considered  _ that  _ place ‘home’. 

Home was where you belonged and Minhyun didn’t think he really belonged there, not anymore, and he certainly didn’t belong in  _ that other place _ either. He didn’t really belong anywhere anymore. 

Maybe once upon a time, he did belong. Maybe he had once had a home in that other place. He used to like to think that he did at least. 

Nowadays, he fancied himself something of a nomad. A traveller. A wanderer. In a metaphorical sense in any case. He had a house, but a house was not a home. In the case of the former, he knew a number of estate agents that would be capable of finding a more than adequate replacement for his current house if he ever wanted it. The latter, on the other hand… He could only rely on himself for that. 

It was still an open problem. 

A gentle flutter in the breeze and an almost imperceptible disturbance in the wind currents behind him alerted Minhyun to the presence of another. Like he always did, Minhyun felt the other’s characteristic warmth permeate through the air before he saw him. 

Minhyun turned his head to his new companion as the latter sighed and rolled his shoulders back, stowing away a pair of well-groomed wings in the same movement. 

“Did you have to choose to brood somewhere so high up and hard to reach?” 

Minhyun glanced pointedly at where the other man’s snowy white appendages had been just moments ago. 

“I didn’t think it would be so much of a challenge for you.” He said, amused. “Unless, you’re telling me that you’re getting old and rusty, Angel.”

Minhyun could practically feel the man’s feathers becoming ruffled in the celestial plane in which his wings were hidden from view. 

“And I’m not brooding.” He felt compelled to add. 

“You’re standing here alone, looking all solemn and  _ broody _ over some valleys and you’d have me believe you  _ aren’t _ brooding?” 

“It’s not brooding. It’s called introspection and reflection.”

“I thought the only reflection you would be interested in would be your own.” 

“Very funny, Jonghyun.” Minhyun deadpanned. 

“Glad you think so.” Jonghyun chirped, unfazed by Minhyun’s demeanour. Though perhaps he was just accustomed to it. A few millennia of being on and off acquaintances, then reluctantly-admitted friends, then, more recently, something Minhyun didn’t even have a name for, did that to people and celestial beings alike. 

“So what is it then? What are you  _ introspecting _ about?” 

The humour in his tone might have made anyone else think they were being laughed at. Not Minhyun though. Jonghyun’s eyes spoke more words than his lips ever did and Minhyun always had paid him more than the value of all the riches of this bountiful Earth in attention. 

“Where it is that I belong.” Even as he admitted it, he cringed. He sounded like one of those gap year backpackers desperate to ‘find themselves’. He mentally scoffed at the idea. 

Jonghyun nodded sympathetically because of course he would.

Certainly, as much as Minhyun wasn’t welcome back to  _ that place _ , Jonghyun wasn’t welcome in  _ the other place. _ However, he strongly doubted that Jonghyun would ever  _ want  _ to be welcome there. Jonghyun was much too  _ good _ for them down there anyway. Jonghyun, who glowed beside him despite the sun having dipped below the mountain tops long ago, whose wings gleamed brighter than the undisturbed snow on any one of these mountains, didn’t belong in places where the only light available came from fiery pits and only ever accompanied tortured screams. 

Minhyun remembered a time when he, too, could have been said to glow. That was back when his wings weren’t mottled black, patchy, and charred. (His own vanity had yet to surpass his instinctive desire to resolutely ignore the damned things as much as possible.)

“Come to any conclusions?” The question interrupted his thoughts. 

“Not really.” Minhyun shrugged. “Upstairs certainly disapprove of me, and frankly the feeling is mutual.”

“And downstairs?”

“Downstairs…” Minhyun paused, “I suspect it’s a similar situation. I haven’t been back in a while to know for sure.”

“When was the last time you went back?”

Minhyun thought for a moment.

“I don’t know, the 60s? Maybe 50s?”

“1950s?”

“1750s.”

Jonghyun looked at him slightly disbelievingly. Minhyun shrugged, hoping to come off nonchalant.

“Got tired of the scenery.” He tried to joke, turning his gaze back over the landscape and avoiding Jonghyun’s gaze that always seemed to see more than what was plainly visible.

Jonghyun seemed to accept his non-answer. Minhyun wouldn’t be surprised if the angel knew what he meant by ‘scenery’ anyway. ‘Other demons’; ‘agonised screams of tortured souls’; ‘obligation to do horrible things in the name of horrible entities’, either of these would have all been equally true. 

“You never were one to play into everyone else’s expectations.” Jonghyun said almost to himself. 

“That’s because, more often than not, their expectations were unreasonable and stupid.” He sighed. “I’m… I’m not  _ good _ — not like they want me to be —”

“But you’re also not sadistically evil.” Jonghyun finished for him.

“Right.”

Those weren’t the words Minhyun personally would have used — he wasn’t sure what he would have used actually — but hearing Jonghyun of all people agree that he wasn’t like to others of his kind gave him more of a feeling of absolution than he thought he would ever have a right to feel. 

“Then does it matter if you’re not rigidly one or the other?”

Minhyun blinked. Well when he put it that way… he supposed not.

“I’m not so sure it has to be so clean-cut.” Jonghyun ventured slowly, staring out towards the horizon. “ _ We _ are not defined by  _ their _ expectations.” He stated with more certainty after a brief pause.

“‘We’?” 

“It’s stuffy and boring up there.” Jonghyun replied evasively. 

Perhaps Jonghyun understood more than Minhyun initially thought. 

“Guess we’re both just settling in the inbetween.” Minhyun remarked in lieu of prying further. He didn’t need to anyway. Minhyun knew what it was like up there, and he’d also been witness to, and the occasional disgruntled victim of, Jonghyun’s mischievous streak. 

“I guess we are.” The corner of Jonghyun’s lips quirked up into a lopsided smile. “We’re a category all on our own.”

Minhyun liked that: the inclusivity of his proclamation. They,  _ Minhyun and Jonghyun _ , were a category of  _ their _ own making. 

There was a brief lull in the conversation before Jonghyun broke the silence. 

“Now that you’ve had your existential crisis, can we get away from this forsaken mountain top. I’m freezing.” He complained. 

Minhyun laughed uproariously as he unfolded out his wings behind him. For the first time in longer than he cared to admit, he didn’t flinch at the sight of them. He stretched one of them around Jonghyun’s shoulders, creating a makeshift shelter from the cold. 

“Better.” Jonghyun allowed, “But I’d still rather head home.”

_ Home.  _

“You’re welcome to come over.” He offered as if Minhyun didn’t usually just invite himself round anyway. 

He gestured for Jonghyun to lead the way back to his  _ home _ . His home where Minhyun had always been welcome. 

Perhaps the humans had been onto something after all. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> So now I guess we'll just wait and see when next I can pull some more words out onto a page. I'd like to think it's not another 4 months later but my hands are tied.
> 
> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nightberrypearl)  
> [Curious Cat](https://curiouscat.me/nightberrypearl)


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